NiTRO Articles

Independent artists are faced with a challenging and transforming landscape that requires adaptive resilience in order to thrive creatively, today and in the future. How do we, as tertiary educators, empower and enable artists to build strong and flexible, professional contemporary art practices? To address this issue, my current research draws models of praxis from artist-run initiatives (ARI) in the Visual Arts industry, specifically from my experience as director of Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space.

The term artistic research is gaining popularity in Australia, particularly in music, where a number of conferences and symposia focused around this terminology including DDCA’s own 2015 symposium: The Outstanding Field: Artistic Research Emerging from the Academy. But what does artistic research encompass? Is it any different from other terminologies used to describe research in and by creative arts disciplines.

The term is perhaps most closely associated with the work of Professor Henk Borgdorff, President of the Society of Artistic Research in Europe, who has published widely on the theoretical and political rationale of research in the arts. Jenny Wilson caught up with him in Amsterdam in April 2016, hot on the heels of his recent speaking tour of European and UK universities, art and music schools, to find out more about artistic research and European experiences of the politics of art and higher education...

'But what is the new knowledge you’re producing?’ Recently I was asked this question at dinner with a colleague from the social sciences, who didn’t intend to challenge the creative arts sector. She really wanted to understand how researchers in the arts went about their work. After explaining as best I could, I realised that having these conversations were eminently useful, because they make us, as creative artists, distill what we do. So what did I say?...

It was not long after the Dawkins reforms that a disenchantment with the pure research PhD model emerged. Commentators began to ask why the preferred model seemed to serve the needs of academia and urged the development of models that were more relevant to the needs of society (Australian Higher Education Council, 1989). Less encumbered by a university-based history and highly focused on practice, the creative arts responded and the sector has since witnessed an exponential uptake in creative arts doctorates.

Yet university understanding of the creative doctorate has remained clouded by traditional expectations for higher degree research...

The narrative of knowledge is almost always underpinned by the cognitive but how we know the world is often through the experiential. Whilst we have moved a long way in redefining knowledge in research terms to include the processes and outcomes of our practices (artistic, creative, professional) and importantly have privileged the artist’s voice as the expert in this recasting of what a knowledge claim might look like, some art forms prove more problematic than others in this endeavour. What if the artist’s voice is embodied thought, articulated through movement, and not text or image or code? For dance artists our narrative of knowledge resides with and in the body...

During the 1990s and 2000s . . . an intensive debate took place among art and design academics as to whether their practices and those of their graduate students could be called research, and if so what “contribution to knowledge” might be made by the creative output. . . . James Elkins famously characterised this “scientification” as a mere response to bureaucratic Research Assessment Exercises in the U.K. and related tertiary education systems. . .

On my last outing in an ACUADS conference, I was described by Flinders University’s Julian Meryick as the “artist’s ideal of a scientist… impatient with the reduction of everything down to short term utility.” So as I venture once again into the creative arts domain, I draw on a scientific analogy. The principle of chemical equilibrium refers to a system in which the rate of consumption of inputs is the same as that at which outputs are produced so that the system is in a stable state of consumption and production...

The decision by the Australia Research Council (ARC) to achieve the long-mooted merging of the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise by adeptly disappearing the HERDC has been welcomed by many discipline leaders, and not just those in the creative arts. With the inclusive ERA becoming the singular evaluation of research quality across Australia, there couldn’t be a better time to rethink the classification of research in universities.

Internationally, a great deal of effort and discourse has propelled artistic research in music into new areas of academic authority, authenticity and autonomy. Borgdorff, de Ruiter, Nettle and Pressing have all championed performance and practice-based research as legitimate ways for creating new and innovative music. Concurrent with the development of experimentation in music has come the legitimisation of making music as research.

The creative practice of filmmaking, understood as a form of academic research, has been growing in scale and significance within Australian universities for several years. While doctorates involving the making of a film have been occurring for decades, it is only relatively recently that the academic screen production community has been seeking to more systematically establish how the production of a film can lead to the discovery of new knowledge.